Into the light

In The Mistress's Daughter, the novelist AM Homes, who was adopted as a baby, explores her relationship with her biological parents. "Her various meetings with Ellen and Norman are described in terms that make them sound like uncomfortable dreams," wrote Christopher Tayler in the Sunday Telegraph, while Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times noted that "Ellen becomes most real after her death, when Homes repossesses her mother and fictionalises her". "This memoir is a gamble for Homes," said Viv Groskop in the New Statesman. "We should be grateful for her honesty: the result is a fearless brand of writing that is utterly compelling." "The Mistress's Daughter turns truth into a fable for the 21st century in much the same way as Nabokov's Lolita did for the 20th or Baudelaire's vision of being haunted by his double for the 19th," declared Hilary Spurling in the Observer. "It thrives on the tangled roots of fact and fiction."

"His flair for making dialogue bloom from inhospitable soil, the way he can magic a memorable encounter out of thin air, and his conviction that there is salvation to be found in the company of strangers - all these familiar Murakami traits animate the pages of the novel," wrote Margaret Hillenbrand in the Financial Times, reviewing Haruki Murakami's After Dark. "The novel's message that the wee small hours run on their own time - inviting confidences and feeding irrational thoughts - plays straight to Murakami's repertoire of reality-bending tricks." "Throughout, individuals behave as if trapped in bubbles," said Lucy Atkins in the Sunday Times, "knocking against each other ... but never so that they burst. This perhaps sounds dark and depressing but it is not. Murakami's gift is that his bizarre and disconnected universe makes intuitive sense."

"While supposedly fiction, large chunks read like documentary exposition," objected Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times, reviewing Dave Eggers's What Is the What, which recounts the harrowing experiences of Valentino Achak Deng during Sudan's civil war. "Eggers is so concerned to reproduce Achak's voice faithfully that he strips the prose of nearly all rhetorical flourishes, preferring instead a flat tone that often works against the dramatic subject matter." "A new literary movement has emerged from the refugee camps of Africa," announced a much more excited Rachel Holmes in the Times, who grouped What Is the What with Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and John Bul Dau's God Grew Tired of Us. "Novelists such as Eggers are re-engaging with the responsibility of writers in civil society, politics and global issues ... these writers from Sudan and America are remapping the genres and consciousness of the fiction and non-fiction that used to be known as 'western'."